What Time Is It?

In the year 2100, a family went out into space for a vacation exactly one light-minute away from home. They used an advanced telescope to look at their clock. The child, Sam, was so exact at time. If it's 9:59, he stays up one minute until ten. One night, Sam looked through the telescope and saw the clock showed 9:59. But his dad said it was ten and he had to go to sleep. How is that possible?

The clock back at home was their ONLY time source.

Hint

Answer

The clock was one light-minute away, so it took the light one minute to reach the telescope. The display was how it looked one minute ago. You have to add one minute, and therefore it was Sam's bedtime.Hide

My eighth grade science teacher told us a story like this, something to the effect of "If aliens, 250 light-years away, looked at Earth through a telescope, they would see the American Revolution."

This sparked my question (which was never answered), "If these aliens had advanced spaceships that could travel at 99.99% of the speed of light (because nothing can travel at the speed of light) directly toward Earth, while maintaining a view of Earth's surface in their special telescope, would they see time on Earth passing a twice (199.99%) of normal speed?" This creates a paradox (he told me) because light cannot travel faster than the speed of light. Maybe someone smart here can help me.

Yeah, Einstein's law of relativity. I know it has all the complicated symbols that hopefully I'll understand someday, but basically, all it states is that if you move fast enough, everything will appear as if it's standing still (hard to explain here), and somehow...it is...standing still. Uuuuh...hmmmm...but if it took know time at all to go one light minute away...errrr...but did they travel forward in time in that light minute? Argh!!!

P.S. Has anyone seen that old Superman movie where Superman find Lois Lane dead, and he circles the earth really fast to go back in time?